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Fumes
by Nicola
Rating: R
Spoilers: #2.22, 'The Telling'
Warnings: voyuerism; slight BDSM
Sark stood in the shadows, not really watching, not quite waiting. Inside, there was movement; soft, hazy colour spilling through the glass. The window was open; just slightly ajar — not more than an inch.
Tease.
In the darkness, the flame burned brightly for a split second. The match fell to the ground, and his cigarette continued to glow. He took a slow drag, savouring the acrid smoke that obliterated his senses.
He was not a smoker. It was her vice.
He'd asked her once, why? He'd learned, there were always stories to people's vices. Watching his father descend into a smoky haze during his formative years, Sark had emerged with a superior GenY distaste for cigarettes.
Scornfully, she'd told of how she began stealing cigarettes from her mother's purse. She would dress up in her mother's high heels and fill the room with smoke.
In a hotel room a thousand miles and another lifetime away, she'd rolled her eyes delicately and climbed carelessly across the furniture, like a kitten. As he'd watched her movements — her bracelets jangling lightly with each skip and jump — he hadn't found it difficult to imagine a child playing dress-up.
He'd caught her by the elbows, and she'd frowned vaguely, blowing smoke in his face. She'd pushed him, hands flat against his chest, until his legs gave way, leaving them to fall backwards onto the bed, a tangle of limbs. She'd tasted of cigarettes and something sweeter when their lips finally met.
Finding his cigarette burned down to the filter, Sark flicked it carelessly away. The room inside was as dark and still as its periphery now.
It wasn't the first time he had stood and watched from this vantage point. It had been a routine of theirs; unspoken, but no less appreciated. Sloane would have frowned upon it; Irina would have laughed at him — they both would have disapproved.
But he had to see her.
It didn't matter that her face had changed. Their faces, like their clothes, were mere costumes: irrelevant and dispensable. She was his axis, and it was her energy—like a beacon, coloured the tarred red of spilled blood—that pulled him magnetically back, night after night, into her proximity.
He'd watched her elaborate games, performed, he was sure, partly for his pleasure. Tippin, her anxious toy, was torn apart and stitched back together each night. As she pulsed toward her climax, her eyes would linger a fraction too long at the window, her lips unmistakably forming the silent hiss of his name.
Sark pushed at the window, and it crept slowly open. With a cat's grace, he levelled the sill and dropped noiselessly onto the carpeted floor inside. His eyes adjusted, and he was able to make out the motionless figure lying in bed.
He advanced slowly, his fingers seeking out the contours of the bed. Finding solid warmth beneath the sheets, Sark climbed carefully onto the bed. Sliding rhythmically up the length of the sleeping body, he finally straddled the chest, his knees firmly pinning either side of the torso.
His touch was feather-light as it met the soft skin of Will's neck. In motions of dream-like subtlety, her traced the lines of his shoulders, lingering at the collarbones and their downward lead. Finally, he let his head drop and placed a single kiss of the side of his neck.
Will's eyes opened, his soft blue gaze meeting Sark's steelier one. "I thought you weren't coming," he said. His voice was a gorgeous mix of reproach, relief and apprehension.
Sliding his tongue the length of Will's neck, Sark murmured his apology — or perhaps his threat. "Quiet."
Leaving his trail, Sark rose above him. His knees pressed further into the mattress, trapping Will roughly. His hands remained at the throat, pressing at the skin with a firmer rhythm: his fingers coaxing a necklace of tiny bruises.
He would like to kill him this way. The ostentatious anonymity of guns or grenades or gas in no way compared to this hands-on approach. This is the way lovers kill every night: shallow breaths and ragged pleas, culminating wildly in the beautiful pain of orgasm.
Sark's fingers tightened around his neck. Will's breath was quick and shallow, but he remained silent. Maybe he wanted it; welcomed a quiet death and the solid exclamation point of a murdered corpse.
Sark released, and in the darkness he was sure he caught the ghost of a smile cross Will's lips.
Seizing upon his assailant's momentary lapse, Will forced his arms upwards, his fingers scratching at Sark's neck. He pulled his face downwards to meet his own. Their lips met, and for a moment Sark was almost passive as Will's tongue slipped inside his mouth.
He tasted, as he did every night, sharp, like cigarettes.
A prostitute outside Dallas had told Sark that he was a sick little fuck. She'd smiled cattily through bubblegum lips and demanded he pay more. He'd paid the extra and she hadn't smiled anymore. The old lie: he didn't need to pay for sex; it was just easier. In Sark's case it was the truth: prostitutes didn't talk. They also didn't care.
Sick little fuck? Probably. He was sure Tippin would agree. The difference with Will was that he did care.
Allison would have disagreed with the Texan whore. Sex with her was different. Maybe it was because they'd met too young; there was too much fumbling and embarrassment for it to be anything less than . . . innocent. He'd learned the art of fucking elsewhere: in different beds across different continents, always simultaneously running away from and back to her.
With Allison it was . . . precious: happier; less complex; tamer; better; worse. Less like fucking and more like lovemaking, he supposed. His mother, spitting in his face as she pushed him out the door, had told him no-one would ever love him. He didn't disagree, but he couldn't help but feel that Allison was the closest he would ever come to such a foreign concept.
Love.
Sark whispered the word in Will's mouth.
As their kiss deepened, their positions shifted consciously, the bedsheets tearing away in their haste. Sark's grip slackened, and Will's torso rose up as he urged himself closer. Sark's fingers were cold and smooth as they skimmed downward. Will shuddered as his hands reached the curve of his stomach. He squirmed, falling away, but Sark's touch continued, deliberate and unstoppable, as he pushed downward.
The scar that traced Will's abdomen was thin and crude. The wound had healed well; according to the doctors, he had been lucky. Luckier than Allison, anyway, whose wounds had been irreparable.
Sark pressed adeptly at the pale scar, his smile sharper than a thousand knives.
An unbroken man was of no interest to Sark. He had observed Tippin with only the faintest of interest in Taipei. His torture was a means to an end; the sideline in a bigger picture. Unbroken men will cry and scream tediously, and ultimately quail into insignificance.
Allison had delivered Will carefully shattered, his broken pieces fused into an opponent worthy of Mr. Sark.
*
Will awoke in stages; at first, hazily aware that morning had broken—shattered—and Sark was gone.
His second thought was for her. He missed her like a body part; explicably, and with a dull pain.
Third- In almost-waking/almost-sleeping, dream-like fragments, he found her, warm and peaceful, in his bed—sweet smiles through orange juice at breakfast—sweeter kisses as he left for work.
Fourth—He was alone.
Consciousness tore through him, and he climbed wearily out of bed.
It had always been easier to pretend during the day. In clear, bright sunshine, her surface perfection was unquestionable. At night, he remembered seeing more of the real her: a faceless ghost and somebody else's whore.
Of course, it helped that he couldn't trust his memories. The CIA had suggested he see a shrink, try to reclaim more of his time spent with her. He'd politely declined; he didn't need another person poking around inside his head.
A mind riddled with (embroidered) holes and (patched) inconsistencies made it easier to pretend. He had loved Francie; his friend forever, and his lover tragically stolen away. Allison Doren was a girl in a photograph, a needle in Sark's heart, and nothing to do with him.
In the bathroom, a pale and broken man stared hollowly through the mirror at him.
After his torture in Taipei, the cuts and bruises had been hard and sharp — but they had healed quickly, leaving smooth, unblemished skin to resurface. A year on, the man in the mirror looked like an unfinished oil painting; smudged and smeared canvas that had been carelessly discarded. Old, faded bruises mottled with their fresh counterparts; russet-red scratches, like those from a vicious cat, carved through his shoulders; and a faint chain of cigarette burns intersected across his chest. The pale scar of her knife wound seemed like an artist's signature.
Even in 90 degree heat, he wore long-sleeved shirts with pants — although even they didn't cover the shadows under his glazed eyes. He frequently awoke more tired than when he'd gone to bed, and his days vanished in a haze of light-headed oblivion. He never slept more than 2 or 3 hours a night, and he sometimes felt that Sark must be the personification of his feverish insomnia. Or else, they were dreams: the clipped British accent and piercing blue eyes that had sliced through his every nightmare since Taipei had come to revisit him in his sleep.
Will went through his morning routine on auto-pilot, barely aware of how he found himself at the CIA compound in time for his 9:00am start.
Sark was co-operating fully with the CIA now. He wasn't locked up — it would have looked too suspicious to outside associates — but his movements were monitored closely.
Will knew that they must watch him every night as he climbed through the bedroom window: his entrance, his exit; the long hours inbetween. Will knew the surveillance capacity of the CIA better than anyone. The skin along his neck and shoulders prickled at these muddy thoughts, like the ghost of Sark's touch.
An agent approached his desk, smarmily polite and purposefully blank.
"Sir, we'll be requiring you assistance in debriefing Mr. Sark."
Blink. "I'll be right there," Will heard himself say.
The agent nodded, but did not move away. Will was sure he detected a flicker of a smirk. His skin burned and his eyesight dissolved. He recognized Sark's presence at the far side of the room — that flash of veneer; effortlessly beautiful, lazily irresistible.
Will procrastinated inanely; he clicked across his computer screen, shuffled some papers into a needless heap. All the time, he was aware of the hideous, dream-like tableau reaching out across the room; in the foreground, the invisible smirk of the agent, compounded by the ominous backdrop of Mr. Sark.
He was barely aware of ground beneath his feet as he finally walked, shadowed by the agent, to where Sark stood.
"Mr Tippin," Sark greeted him, with an invisible smile. He extended his hand, and Will felt the heat pouring like lava through his veins as he grasped it tightly. "I thought you weren't coming."
July 2003
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